From the mind to substance

That changes things

Ryan, the seven-term representative from Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District, speaks quickly, as if the coming collapse might happen in the middle of his remarks if he takes too much time. It’s a bracing message. He is saying, in effect, that the American experiment, our 236 extraordinary years of self-government, is on the verge of failure.

And yet Ryan is smiling. It’s not the phony grin of a politician seeking votes, or the half-smirk of a charlatan putting one over on a group of rubes. It’s a real smile—the eager smile of someone excited to share important news. Paul Ryan believes he has the solution to these problems. And after a long and often lonely fight to convince his fellow Republicans that they should be talking about these issues, Ryan is succeeding.

Brownback says that Ryan is just not a political guy. “It’s all policy to him,” Brownback says. “People don’t appreciate just how much of a policy guy Ryan is and how little of a politician he is.”

“America faces a choice between two fiscal and economic futures,” Ryan wrote in the introduction.

In one, the Federal Government attempts to satisfy the multiple needs of a changing population, in a rapidly changing world, with outdated policies that demand ever-rising levels of public spending. The effort overwhelms the government’s capacities, and smothers the economy under crushing burdens of debt and high taxes. It is a future in which America’s best century is the past century.

The second future calls for a transformation—or more accurately, a restoration of the principles that created America’s freedom and prosperity. It is the path set out in a plan I have developed called A Roadmap for America’s Future.Ryan has already achieved one objective he’d set for himself when he decided to remain in Congress and work on entitlement reform. “My goal was to move the center of gravity in the Republican party on these issues.

It seemed naïve, maybe impossible before he started. His next goal could be characterized the same way. “There’s no way you can actually save this country from a debt crisis, and save the American idea, if you don’t do the kinds of things we’re proposing,” Ryan says. “We’ll see how it ends.”